Among the things I found while clearing out my office of 16 years of accumulation:

• Lots and lots of printed photos. Back in the day, all photos were prints. Early in our process we scaled the photos using a proportion wheel – sort of like a slide rule – and then sent that calculation with the newspaper paste-up pages to the printers.

There are an untold number of things I will miss about leaving behind a career in journalism. Those “things” almost all are people.

You can’t be in this business without interacting with a tremendous number of people. That’s healthy for me, because I’m naturally very introverted; I could easily be a hermit. I have to work at the interaction more than those who are inexplicably gregarious.

Those interactions, whether with the wonderful people I work with on a daily basis or the individual contacts with citizens, are endlessly fascinating.

One of the realities of leaving The News-Times is that, for the first time in 16 years, my opinion no longer will be louder than anyone else’s during the next elections.

My opinion has never been more valid that anyone’s; I merely had a bigger platform for presenting it, and generally readers accepted its credibility. That’s been quite gratifying, and I’ve felt like I played at least a small role in helping to shape this county’s direction.

A friend the other day called Columbia County School Board member Mike Sleeper “courageous” because he was the only trustee to vote against a 1-mill tax hike.

I disagree. Not because I disagree with Sleeper, but because these days voting against a tax increase is easy. Voting for a tax increase at the local level is just about the hardest thing an elected official can do.

Many of the responses were eye-rolling – I’m not that old – or puzzled. Most, I think, didn’t take me seriously, which isn’t unusual as I spend a great deal of time not being serious.

In this case, though, I am serious. In the next few weeks, depending on the transition, I’ll be retiring from the news business and starting a second career in non-profits - specifically, with Goodwill Industries of Middle Georgia and the CSRA.

I don’t have any young’uns in Columbia County schools anymore. My last one picked up her diploma at the James Brown Arena and Airhorn Test Facility last year, signaling the final trip across a high school stage for my girls.

So except for the need one day for service from one of you – you know, at a drive-through window, if this diploma is the highest you ever achieve, or perhaps at the doctor’s office, if you’re one of the many smart ones – it would seem that I don’t have a vested interest in your success or failure.

Is there anyone whose heart is bigger, or mission in life greater, than Janet Hicks?

You couldn’t make up this kind of resume. She’s retiring this week as the principal of the upper school at Augusta Prep. But that, of course, was merely her second career: Her first was the U.S. Army, where she rose through the ranks to become the commanding general at Fort Gordon.

Good Lord. Running up to Mother’s Day, was the theme for the week in Columbia County “Moms Gone Wild”?

What a one-two punch. First a 27-year-old Augusta woman runs off the side of Ray Owens Road in Appling and crashes into a tree. At first we think her 2-year-old is killed in the crash, and the outrage is directed at the fact that the initial story includes the information that the toddler was in the front of the car, not belted in.